Raising Fire

by James Bennett

  No. It was no sun, he saw. It was a pale colossus, a beacon of doom hunkering over the ley.

  The Ghost Emperor.

  Ben recognised the beast from his visions, his spasmodic glimpses of the beyond. The Emperor’s gelatinous mass shone against the surrounding darkness like the last star left in the cosmos. Looking up at this king of Lurkers, Ben cringed, taking in the huge horned dome of its head, a crown of spectral light swallowing the whole of his vision. Nausea threatened to overwhelm him, his guts cramping at the sight. The beast’s tentacles, six to eight of them, each one riddled with suckers, reached out for the alien road, then recoiled from the sparks that showered at his touch, a motion that struck Ben as both ravenous and tentative, questing for power.

  Lurkers, he had learnt, tended to avoid the Silver Leys. Von Hart had told him that the Fay magic had a lethal effect on the half-formed creatures, disintegrating whatever misbegotten stuff comprised their essence. He had seen their aversion for himself last year, when the envoy had chased them away from the threshold of the nether. But magic, he knew, was growing sour. And in turn, the phantoms had grown bold. The Lurkers had gathered, amassing into this shining whole, no doubt endowing the ghost-beast with strength. Strength enough to challenge the boundaries of existence and the charmed highways of the Fay? Ben shivered at the thought.

  The void thrummed with power, shuddering through the Ghost Emperor. The energy swept in reefs through his vast endoskeleton, streams of electrical light converging behind his layered grille of bone, his curving, tusk-like visor. The phantom hovered over the ley, a see-through, coruscating giant, his maw a blazing white core, blinding in its intensity.

  Jia, Ben noticed, was crouching before the thing like a penitent, the two fused fragments of the Cwyth clutched to her breast. Awaiting the third and final piece. Drawing to a breathless halt, he made sure to keep a cautious distance between himself and the sin-you, his fists clenched. But he could tell there was no threat left in her, her back turned to him, her bowed head and kneeling body outlined by the flickering light. She didn’t turn at his approach, even though he sensed she knew he was there. He took a vague comfort from that; she had let him catch up. The great beast shed pearlescent rays that sparked and recoiled off the ley some distance beyond her.

  But too close. Too damn close.

  The proximity of the Emperor pressed on him, an amassed weight of energy. Gagging, he fought the urge to double over with his hands on his knees, letting whatever passed for air in these other-worldly depths fill his lungs. He wanted to speak, to reach Jia with his urgency, but before he could do so, a voice filled his skull, booming into the void. A voice that he knew from his visions. From centuries of odd acquaintance. It had never sounded colder.

  “So you return, Daughter of Empires. The key has turned. The glass shattered. And you have brought me the harp.”

  For all its sonorous power, there was a strain in the echoes. Pain.

  Shielding his eyes, Ben looked up at the Ghost Emperor. There was something about the beast’s maw, something in that thrashing core of light. Something he couldn’t immediately place … Puissance radiated from the thing, but also intelligence, a conscious intent. He had seen Lurkers up close and personal before and all he’d sensed in them was a blank need, a ravenous hunger, a lust to feast on magic at its source. This was different. There was someone inside the beast, sitting behind its grille of bone, a pale, cross-legged form.

  He glared into the blazing sun over the ley, directing his anger at the one who spoke from within it.

  “Von Hart,” he said. “What the hell are you playing at?”

  Ben made out his ancient master, locked in the ghost-beast’s maw. Was this the cell from which the envoy had summoned him, reaching out through the walls of reality? Calling to him. A choice. A plea. Even from a distance, he could see that the envoy wasn’t himself. His starry robes had burned away and he held his limbs, pure alabaster, in a rigid pose of meditation, surrounded by the flailing brightness. Von Hart clutched an object to his chest, his arms crossed over stark ribs. His white-gold hair was a bristling mop, sizzling with supernatural force.

  Angry as he was, Ben experienced a pang of sympathy to see the fairy, usually so poised and impeccable, looking so beleaguered and weak. He wouldn’t have counted on the feeling in a thousand years. Grief eddied through him—an emotion that lasted precisely five seconds until he remembered the Lambton armour, the suspected summoning of Mauntgraul, the sense of a wider game playing out, with him as the bloody roulette ball.

  He scowled, a need for answers shoving compassion out of the way.

  “Ah, Ben.” The envoy’s voice echoed in his mind. “You heard me. You made it. Danke, liebling.”

  “Save it. You won’t thank me once I get you out of that thing. Trust me.”

  “Always playing the hero,” Von Hart said, his sarcasm plain. “Dare I say I relied on that? But there is only one thing I need from you here. You’re too late for anything else.”

  Catch her. Let me fall.

  “You unleashed the White Dog, didn’t you? Trying to create a distraction, cover your tracks.” Ben swallowed the embers in his throat. “Do you know how many people have died?”

  “A sad necessity. A choice of evils.”

  The envoy said this in a typically dismissive manner, prompting a growl from Ben.

  “Don’t give me that bullshit. You’re gonna answer for this. Somehow, I’ll make you—”

  “I’ve already answered, Ben. And so have you. For centuries we’ve suffered, yoked and shackled under the Lore. There was only one way to break our chains.”

  By breaking the Lore. By shifting the foundations, causing a breach … Again, Ben recalled the Lambton armour, the evidence of Von Hart’s hand in things, perhaps fanning the flames of Remnant sedition, the conspiracy last year. He didn’t know how deep the envoy’s involvement went, but judging by the scene before him, he could take a guess.

  You knew all along, didn’t you? Ghosts from limbo. The living and the dead trading places.

  What had started all this? This breach in the Lore? He wasn’t likely to forget it. The breaking of a forgotten tomb. The raising of an old god. How hard would it have been to point Professor Winlock, the noted archaeologist, in the right direction? To place unearthed relics in the hands of the Three, who in turn passed them to human hands? A conspiracy that went even deeper, a web within a web, the envoy extraordinary waiting for his moment, the Pact in tatters, the Lore in disarray. And into the chaos, he had sent his student, his thief, his strange-coloured eyes fixed on the endgame: the undoing of the Sleep.

  Just how long had he planned all of this? Years? Centuries? Ben considered the monumental risk, the fairy gambling with the fate of the world. All those who had fallen as a result. Those who had nearly died, including his former lover Rose.

  But there was more to it than that. He could feel it in his bones. When he’d been in need, the envoy had been there, plucking him from certain death on two occasions—had it really all been a game? This prompted a colder thought, clutching at his heart. Von Hart might have used him as a wild card, a way to limit the damage caused by his greater plans. But it was also clear that the envoy needed him for something. And he got the feeling that he wouldn’t like it when he found out …

  Ben snarled. All of this had started with the envoy, centuries ago. Forever ago. He recalled the painting in du Sang’s tomb, Von Hart standing with shoulders slumped, the broken harp at his feet, watching his people depart. Then, one historic day on Thorney Island, he had brought the fragments of the Cwyth before the Curia Occultus, re-forging Arthur’s shattered harp at the foot of King John’s throne. It made a horrible kind of sense that the story would end with him too, the enchantment undone by his lily-white hands.

  “The harp, the Sleep …” Ben was spluttering, shouting up at the shimmering beast. “It was all your fucking idea in the first place.”

  Von Hart shrugged. Then he winced, as if the gesture ca
used him pain.

  “I made a mistake,” he said, simply. “Times change. So do hearts. I have found another way.”

  “By becoming this … this monster?” Ben spat. “It’s you, isn’t it? It was you all along. You’re the Ghost Emperor.”

  As soon as Ben said this, he knew he was right. He merely uttered the nub of his fears. It had been there with every strum of the Fay artefact, every note of the lullaby, the raising of dragons and their binding. The telling absence of phantoms.

  Jia had told him as much in the hills outside Beijing, he realised that now.

  The Lurkers are merging in the nether, she’d said. Something is drawing them to the earth. Something has caught their attention. Something big.

  “Ja,” Von Hart said. “One cannot reignite such magic without understanding the cost. I turned the Lurkers’ eyes from the earth. I summoned them here, to feed on a living source of magic. As only I could have done.”

  Looking up at Von Hart, Ben could see the means in his hands, clutched to his scrawny chest: the last fragment, the column of the harp. The Fay had carved the rounded spar, roughly two feet in length, to resemble the chest, neck and head of a horse, all exquisitely moulded in lunewrought. Except that it wasn’t a horse, was it? He had seen as much in the paintings in du Sang’s tomb: Nimue, Queen of the Fay, bringing the fabled instrument to King Arthur in his tent during the Battle of Camlann. Her offering hadn’t gone down well, sparking years of abandonment and pain …

  And here the relic rested in the hands of another, having spun down the ages through legend and history, shimmering before him in all its other-worldly glory. The top of the column formed a proud bust of blank silver eyes and a windswept mane, a single horn winding conch-like from its pure white brow. The tapering tip was as sharp as a spear.

  Dragons and unicorns. The gang’s all here.

  And ghosts.

  “Why?” Ben said, breathless in the dark. “Why have you done this?”

  But he thought he already knew.

  “The circles are breaking,” Von Hart replied. “Magic is souring. The Sleep is failing. The Remnants will die.”

  Ben shut his eyes at the echoes in his head, squeezing out the light. He wanted to argue, to resist the idea, but du Sang had explained the truth under Paris, the ailing state of the Remnants. Fuck, he’d known it in his bones before then, in the creatures that had fallen by his hand, Rakegoyle, Jordsønn, Mauntgraul … and the others brought low, destroyed by the seismic shift in the Lore. Queen Atiya. The Three. He wished he could say that he mourned them, but he couldn’t deny their origin, these creations of the Fay. Remnants all.

  Coupled to this was the human cost, slayers, knights, True Names—and worst of all, civilians, blind to the mythical beasts in their midst, heedless of the Lore, yet still paying the price.

  And he had seen it in Jia’s eyes, her haunted look, her choice that was no choice at all.

  I can save them.

  As if rousing from a dream, she stood before him now, facing him with tears on her cheeks.

  “It’s true, Ben,” she said. “I’ve seen it for myself in the Eight Hand Mirror. I am a creature born to perceive the truth and my master chose me for that very purpose. To turn the key in the door of the world. To shatter the glass of illusion. To pave the road to our freedom.”

  “To start a war,” he told her, bluntly.

  A frown troubled her brow. Her knuckles whitened, tightening on the fused fragments of the harp, and he knew that she was expecting him to make a lunge for it. But he was still too far away, and the sin-you, he knew, was too fast.

  Still she shook the artefact at him, as if warding away her doubts.

  “There is no other way! We will wake them and fight for peace.”

  Ben laughed, a bitter snort. “And do you think for one second that the Sleepers will share your vision? After centuries trapped in slumber?” Reluctantly he pictured it, the dark days to come. “A sky full of dragons. A city facing giants. Witches, Jia. Ogres. Trolls. You think they’re going to thank you?”

  “The envoy—”

  “Will do what? He put them there in the first place. You think they’re going to listen?”

  “We must all make sacrifices,” she said. A mutter, no more.

  “You’re the one who needs to wake the fuck up. You’re talking about a massacre beyond imagining. Magic versus machines. Myths against man. And for what? So you get to see your own kind again? You want to save your parents, isn’t that right? A handful of Remnants in exchange for thousands of people. That’s what you mean by sacrifice?” He grunted, then spat on the ley. “Sounds pretty selfish to me.”

  Jia glared at him for a moment, but she couldn’t hold his gaze.

  “How I have ached for them, Ziyou and Ye,” she said. “From the walls of Xanadu to the mists of Mount Song and the fires of the Opium Wars. To gallop beside them, the wind in our manes … Here I stand with the harp in my hands. If I wasn’t youxia, sworn to emperors, then what could have stopped me from running to the northern plains, strumming these fragments and rousing them from the Sleep?” She turned away from him, looking up at the Ghost Emperor. “No, Ben. You are wrong. So wrong. As long as we live under the Lore—under the lie—there can be no place for us in this world.”

  And from the brilliance, her master summoned her.

  “Jia. Bring me the harp.”

  At his echoing voice, Ben watched her spine stiffen, her neck lifting. Then she nodded to herself, blinking away tears. She held the partly forged harp to her breast, the silvery light illuminating her sorrow. Slowly she walked down the ley, leaving Ben to his rage.

  But he wasn’t done with her.

  “If you do this,” he shouted, stumbling after her, “there’ll be no going back. You’ll never wash the blood from your hands.”

  If he could only catch up with her, reach her somehow …

  She spat at him over her shoulder.

  “My master will re-forge the harp. We’ll awaken the Sleepers. We’ll save them all.”

  “No. You’ll damn us.” He hated the pleading tone of his voice, his hands reaching out for her. “Listen to me. The fairy, Von Hart—he’s been playing us all along. He caused the breach in the Lore in the first place, I’m sure of it. You might be right about the magic souring. The Remnants dying. But can you trust him, Jia? Can you trust a word he says? Look at all the people he’s deceived. The people who’ve died. How do you know what the fuck he wants? You said it yourself. He’s the Fay.”

  Jia slowed, coming to a halt. Ben wanted to leap for her, wrestle the harp from her grasp, refuse to accept that this destructive path was the only option left to him. Instead, he halted too, keeping his distance, watching her doubts play out.

  “He is my master,” she said. “And I am a sin-you, born to see the truth from lie.”

  “Fair enough,” Ben replied. “Then ask him.”

  Jia hesitated.

  “Ask him.”

  She bowed her head, her braid shaking down the curve of her back as she struggled with some inner decision, some inner war. Perhaps she sensed the truth of his words. Perhaps, deep down, she knew it herself. Wasn’t that her nature? Oh, how she wanted to believe. He could see it in her rigid stance, her trembling shoulders, her tears. A hope that had probably festered through centuries, through years. Making her ripe for the plucking.

  Need had blinded her, an illusion, a trick. All he had to do was open her eyes.

  Finally she looked up at the Ghost Emperor again.

  “Master …” but she couldn’t put her doubt into words.

  “I told you,” Von Hart said, his voice booming from the beast’s maw. Could Ben hear impatience as well as pain? Fear? He thought so. “A worm gnaws at the heart of things. This is the best way. The only way.”

  Ben watched Jia’s shoulders slump, the harp gleaming in her arms.

  After a while, she said, “Smoke and mirrors. You lied to me before.”

  “I … spared you,”
Von Hart replied. “You weren’t ready, my dear. Now bring me the harp. Or do you welcome death?”

  “Death comes regardless. Isn’t that what you said?”

  “Yes. You have looked through the glass and seen it yourself.”

  “I have,” Jia breathed. “You wish to undo the lullaby. To break the enchantment. But that isn’t the whole truth. Is it?”

  Von Hart straightened at this, his eyes narrowing behind the Emperor’s visor, fierce violet slits.

  “Remember that I am your master.”

  “That isn’t an answer. What are you hiding, Von Hart? What is your real purpose here?” She spoke through her teeth, a savage hiss. “Will you spare me that too?”

  For a moment silence stretched out between them, master and student, as piercing as the light that framed them.

  Then Von Hart shook the column in his fist, his fringe falling in his face as he shrieked down at her.

  “Bring me the harp!”

  The ghost-beast shuddered, feeding on the envoy’s wrath, his anguish. Light rippled over his bulk, his tentacles quivering, sparking off the ley. Jia took a step back, her face calm, her eyes hard. Once again she was youxia, in control of herself. She was a sin-you, unmoved by the envoy’s dissembling.

  “The Sola Ignis is right,” she said, nodding. “Another mirror, reflecting truth. Reminding me of my duty. I am Jia Jing, the appointed judge of the court of Kublai Khan, Guardian of the East, Keeper of the Lore. And if death must come, then I choose to meet it with honour.”

  With this, she turned her back on the Ghost Emperor.

  “It won’t come by my hand. Not any more.”

  She looked at Ben. She smiled, a thin knife of acceptance. Of loss. Of hope.

  “Ben,” she said.

  Ben held out his hand.